First lady: Priority is ensuring ‘family is whole’

WASHINGTON (AP) — Michelle Obama is pushing back against the notion that she and President Barack Obama don’t socialize enough in Washington.The first lady says in an interview in the April issue of Vogue magazine that she and the president were straightforward when they said — before moving from Chicago to Washington in 2009 — that their family, including two young daughters, would be their priority.She said “the stresses and the pressures” of the White House are so real that they prefer to spend free time with their daughters, now 14 and 11.

“Our job is, first and foremost, to make sure our family is whole. You know, we have small kids; they’re growing every day. But I think we were both pretty straightforward when we said, ‘Our No. 1 priority is making sure that our family is whole,'” Mrs. Obama said in the interview, a copy of which was provided to The Associated Press before the magazine hits newsstands on March 26.

The first lady, who makes her second appearance on Vogue’s cover, this time wearing a blue, sleeveless Reed Krakoff dress, noted that most of the couple’s friends are parents, too, and said that when she and the president go on vacation, usually with longtime friends or relatives, they are surrounded by children.

“The stresses and the pressures of this job are so real that when you get a minute, you want to give that extra energy to your 14- and 11-year-old,” the first lady said.

The overpopulation myth MYTH

I keep hearing, even among some in the alternative media, that the overpopulation of humans on our planet is a myth because “all the people in the world could fit in the state of Texas.”

Sure they can, but then where would they pee?

This is not an idle question. The argument that the world isn’t overpopulated merely because they could theoretically all be squeezed into one large land mass is an utterly fallacious argument, and I need to urge my friends in the alternative media to stop making this argument because it doesn’t fly.

The question of overpopulation is not — and has never been — how many humans the planet can physically hold in terms of cubic meters and physical volume. The question is how many humans the biosphere can support in terms of sustainable life.

This isn’t a complicated thing to understand: Your physical body could fit in a box that’s 24 x 24 x 80 inches. It’s called a coffin. But your biological needs require a far larger footprint on the planet. You need water, for starters. Where does it come from? I guarantee you use far more water each day than falls on a 24″ x 24″ piece of land. The water needs of a single person vastly outpace the physical space that person occupies. The entire population of Los Angeles, for example, needs literally thousands of square miles of water basin space to capture all the water that’s pumped into their artificial city.

You need food. Where does the food come from? Vast tracts of land that need sunshine, water and soil. It’s not hard to imagine that the food needs of a single person on our planet probably exceed one thousand square meters of land. If we really squeezed the entire global population into the state of Texas, where would they grow their food?

You produce biological waste. Where does all your waste go? Processing that waste and “recycling” it back into the ecosystem requires huge amounts of land space. Nature needs a large, functioning ecosystem to dilute, process and transform the waste products of humanity, and in fact nature isn’t even keeping up.

All told, the amount of land space required to support one human life is immensely larger than the amount of physical space occupied by one human body. This is classically called the “ecological footprint” of a human being. It’s not a conspiracy theory and it’s not something fabricated by Al Gore: We really do need a LOT of space to meet the demands of food, water, energy, resources, waste processing and so on.

Thus, the argument that “the entire population of the world could fit inside the state of Texas” is complete nonsense. You can fit a dozen people in a phone booth, but if you leave them in there for too long, they will die. If you cut off Los Angeles from the rest of the world, it will die. If you cut off New York City from the rest of the country, it will die. To support life, people need far more land mass on the planet than their physical bodies occupy.

How women experience stress: what the research tells us

Several recent studies have come to the same conclusion: at work, and ingeneral, women are feeling the pressures of stress more than their male peers.

Whether it’s anxiety, a feeling of failure, or the need to binge-eat a sleeve of Oreo cookies, the experience of stress varies from person to person, but there are also themes that connect women’s experience of stress.

For one, that stomach-churning anxiety is far more common in women than men.

A 2008 study led by Yale’s Dr Tara Chaplin, whose research focuses on the role of gender and emotion, found that women are more likely than men to feel sad and anxious because of stress. Women are also more likely to ruminate on those negative feelings.

When we asked our female readers about their experience with stress last week, many of the 80 responders reported such feelings of anxiety or sadness:

Some days I sit in my bedroom and think of all the things I need to do, bills I need to pay, jobs I didn’t get and question the foundation and fundamental parts of my present day life
Sara – New York, NY

I have more responsibilities than I feel I can accomplish in 40 hours each week. I put enormous pressure on myself to be perfect. I have work dreams when things get really bad.
Mallory – Portland, OR

The propensity to dwell on negative emotions, internalize stress and blame yourself may constrain many women’s ability to work through stressful situations.

Poll finds attitude shift among working moms

WASHINGTON (AP) — Working mothers increasingly want full-time jobs, and tough economic times might be a big reason, according to a national survey.In the Pew Research Center study being released Thursday, researchers saw a big spike in the share of working mothers who said they’d prefer to work full time; 37 percent said that was their ideal, up from 21 percent in 2007.The poll comes amid a national debate on women in the workplace ignited by top Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg, who writes in a new book about the need for women to be more professionally aggressive.

In “Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead,” Sandberg argues that women have not made true progress in the workplace over the past decade and that they need to raise their hands more and “lean in” if they want to land more senior positions in corporate America.

The shift toward full-time work in the Pew poll, however, coincides with the recession and may have less to do with career ambitions than with financial realities.

“Women aren’t necessarily evolving toward some belief or comfort level with work,” says study co-author Kim Parker, an associate director at the center. “They are also reacting to outside forces and in this case, it is the economy.”

Time use patterns for moms and dads have converged dramatically during the past half century, with fathers spending a lot more time with kids and on house chores, even as mothers spend rising hours at workplaces.

Child care. In 2011, fathers with kids under age 18 in the home spent an average of seven hours per week on child care, up from 2.5 hours per week in 1965, according to data collected in nationwide time-use surveys. Interestingly, moms have also put more focus on child-rearing over that time, with child care rising from 10 hours per week to 14.

A new study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry reveals that one in seven new mothers may be suffering from postpartum depression.

The postnatal condition is a form of depression that is experienced after a woman gives birth and usually occurs within three months from when the mother delivered.

A cause has yet to be determined, however, experts speculate that the mental illness may be related to hormone changes that are experienced during and after pregnancy.

This type of clinical depression ranges from cases that are moderate to severe and include risk factors like being younger than 20 and alcohol, drug or tobacco use.

Other risk factors include having an unplanned pregnancy, mixed feelings about the pregnancy as well as a medical history of depression, bipolar disorder or anxiety disorders.

But not all cases of postpartum depression are identified or even treated.

“The vast majority of postpartum women with depression are not identified or treated even though they are at higher risk for psychiatric disorders,” said Dr. Katherine Wisner, the study’s lead author and director of the Asher Centre for Research and Treatment of Depression at Northwestern University in Chicago.

“A lot of women do not understand what is happening to them. They think they’re just stressed or they believe it is how having a baby is supposed to feel,” Wisner told the Telegraph.

Researchers evaluated 10,000 women for depression as part of the study via telephone interviews between four to six weeks after labor.

“We asked them whether they had been able to laugh and see the funny side of things…(as well as their) ability to look forward with enjoyment to things, whether or not they’re blaming themselves necessarily when things go wrong, feeling anxious or worried for no good reason, being scared or panicky for no good reason,” said Dorothy Sit, an investigator for the study and psychiatrist at the University of Pittsburgh.

Some experts believe that all women should be screened for postpartum depression.

“I think we still in this country really do not recognize mental health issues, we still have that Puritan, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, be-tough attitude,” said June Horowitz who was not involved in the study and is a postpartum depression researcher and professor of nursing at Boston College.

“It should be the gold standard that everyone gets screened for postpartum depression,” she told the Pittsburg Post-Gazette.

“Breast-Feeding May Not Lead to Leaner Children”

Breast-feeding is widely encouraged for its many positive health effects, but the claim that it reduces the risk for childhood obesity may be going too far. A randomized trial has found that even long-term exclusive breast feeding has no effect on obesity or stature in childhood.

Researchers studied more than 13,000 breast-feeding mother-infant pairs in 31 maternity hospitals in Belarus in 1996 and 1997. About half the mothers followed a breast-feeding promotion program developed by the World Health Organization, while the rest received usual care.

At three months, 43 percent of the women in the W.H.O. program were still exclusively breast-feeding, compared with 6 percent in the control group; by six months, the figures were 7.8 percent for those in the program and 0.6 percent for the controls.

Don’t Lean In: Do We Want Mothers to Work Part-Time?

A new survey from Pew Research shows mothers and fathers converging in the ways they spend their time, in the ways they want to spend their time — and in what we say we want out of a balanced life.

Pew surveyed 2,511 adults nationwide, asking questions about things like what’s important to them in a job, whether they prefer full- or part-time work, and whether it’s difficult to balance work and family. Then Pew researchers analyzed data from the American Time Usage Survey to look at not just how we want to spend our time (or how we say we want to spend our time, which could be quite different), but how we actually spend it.

What they found was progress toward an equal overall distribution of paid work and work at home: women, on average, spending more time working for pay (21 hours a week on average, up from 8 hours in 1965) and men, on average, spending more time engaged in housework and child care, and less time on paid work (fathers have tripled the amount of time they spend with their children since 1965, and doubled the time spent on housework).

But as some numbers reflect a gradual shift toward equality (which needn’t mean pure equality in every household, but an overall societal balance in how fathers and mothers spend their time), one particular statistic stands out as inconsistent with that shift: 42 percent of the general public (45 percent of mothers and 41 percent of fathers) say the best thing for children is to have a mother who works part-time. Here’s the question Pew asked:

“In your opinion, what is the ideal situation for young CHILDREN: mothers working full-time, mothers working part-time, or mothers not working at all outside the home?”

And here is the question they didn’t ask: “In your opinion, what is the ideal situation for young CHILDREN in two-parent homes: both parents working full-time, one parent working part-time, or one parent not working at all outside the home?”

In a survey and a report on social trends looking at the question of increasing work and home equality, why not ask the question in an equal way?

“Partly because we had asked that question in the past,” said Kim Parker, associate director of the Pew Social & Demographic Trends Project and one of the authors of the “Modern Parenthood” report. “We did ask new questions about what would be better for both men and women with young children — working full time or part time or not at all. But we didn’t frame the question about what would be best for young children in that way. I wish we had.”

Without an answer to that broader question, Pew has inadvertently reinforced the standard trope that it’s women, not men, who are ultimately responsible for children. (The Census Bureau even considers parenting, when done by men, to be a separate “child care arrangement.”) That’s the kind of language that tells women to step back if they expect to have a family — because when it comes to “what’s best for young children,” moms are the ones we look to — and blame.

Survey: U.S. women feel pressed to work more as economy rebounds

More women see need to work full-time, and still doing more around the house

More American womenare feeling pressed to work a greater number of hours even as the country emerges from its economic doldrums. A Pew Research Center Report released on Thursday found nearly one in three Americans mothers last year said they would prefer a full-time job, up from one in five in 2007.

Federal employee Leslie Shah went back to work just after her second child celebrated his first birthday, one of a growing number of American mothers who are choosing full-time work since the U.S. economic downturn.

“It really came down to a financial decision,” said Shah, 44, who lives in Maryland just outside Washington. “Gas prices are up, my grocery bill is up.”

Lead researcher Kim Parker cited the 2007-2009 recession as the likely factor behind the findings, adding that fewer women said they wanted to work full time before the downturn.

“I doubt that that’s because that’s what they really want, but that’s what they really need to provide for their families,” Parker said in an interview.

Pew’s findings, based in part on its survey of 2,511 adults nationwide in late 2012, came amid renewed public debate about working mothers in the United States.

Former U.S. State Department official Anne-Marie Slaughter, put working moms back in the spotlight with a magazine article last summer on “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” In the fall, Yahoo Chief Executive Marissa Mayer announced she put in a full day’s work two weeks after her baby was born, then banned telecommuting a few months later.

The debate intensified this month with Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg’s new book “Lean In” pushing women to take on leadership roles. One woman who did that, former Lehman Brothers chief financial officer Erin Callan, lamented in the New York Times on Sunday never having taken the time to have children.

The uproar stirred by the female executives opened wounds about privilege, choice and class divide. Critics said that for American women who are not well-paid top company officials, there is often no choice in the matter — they have to work — and the debate over style and leadership is all but moot.

According to Pew, women struggling with money, especially single mothers, were far more likely to desire full-time jobs.

About half of women who struggled financially said working full time was ideal, compared to about 31 percent of those who said they live comfortably, the nonpartisan research group’s report said.

Study: More Moms Want To Work Full-Time

March 14, 2013 5:38 PM

MINNEAPOLIS (WCCO) — A new study shows a jump in the number of moms who say they want to work full-time.

The Pew Research study says 32 percent of mothers with children under the age of 18 said their ideal would be to work full-time.

That is a 12-point increase over the 20 percent who said so in 2007, before the economy tanked.

It definitely is 40 percent of moms with family incomes below $50,000 that say they would like to work full-time.
But the study also found that a third of mothers who described themselves as living “comfortably” would also like to be full-time workers.

Jessica Huntington works in Hennepin County’s Healthworks program.

Her son Bryce is two and a half. Working part time is not an option, she said.

“There is a financial need for me to work full-time,” Huntington said.

But financial reasons, especially the cost of day care, can drive moms like registered nurse Shana Fink, a mother of four, from full to part-time work.

“Financially and for my family its best for me to work part-time right now,” she said. “It was a huge adjustment for me to go from full-time with two children to part-time with four children. But you do what you got to do.”

The survey found 56 percent of working moms say it is difficult to balance their work and family responsibilities.

But dads worry, too. Fifty percent of fathers say they have a hard time juggling work and family.

And when it comes to feeling guilty about not spending time with their kids — it’s dads who feel the worst.

Pew study: Mothers’ and fathers’ roles in household converging more and more

DENVER — The roles of mothers and fathers in the American household are increasingly converging, according to a new Pew Research Center study.

While neither has overtaken the other in their “traditional” realms – men still do more work outside the home while women take a larger role in child-rearing – parents seem to be “crossing over” more than ever.

Roughly 60 percent of two-parent households with children under age 18 have two working parents. In those households, on average, fathers spend more time than mothers in paid work, while mothers spend more time on childcare and household chores. However, when their paid work is combined with the work they do at home, fathers and mothers are carrying an almost equal workload, the study said.

Interestingly, the genders appear to have different priorities at work. Dads are much more likely than moms to say they want to work full time. And when it comes to what they value most in a job, working fathers place more importance on having a high-paying job, while working mothers are more concerned with having a flexible schedule.

And despite how parents may actually be spending their time, a mere 16 percent of everyone surveyed said they would consider a household with a mother who works full-time to be an “ideal” situation.

Swedish church camp issues ‘sex diplomas’ to 14-year-olds on ‘Love and Sexuality’ course

Shocked parents in Sweden have complained after 14-year-olds at a Lutheran Church confirmation camp were given a ‘shagging diploma’.

The students, who were attending a course entitled Love and Sexuality in the south-eastern Swedish town of Ronneby, were given a certificate stating they were “qualified for sex”.

According to reports the vicar Mats-Ola Nylen said the course was organised by a man who claimed he was from the Swedish Association for Sexuality Education (RFSU). It later emerged that the man had not worked for the organisation for years.

The row was ignited after parents complained that their children were too young to have sex and that the certificates should not have been issued. The age of consent in Sweden is 15.

Parents were also unhappy about some of the language used in the class including the phrases like “giving someone a blow job”.

Only about one in five central Pennsylvania women who have experienced intimate partner violence is asked or counseled by a health care provider about abuse, according to Penn State medicine and public health science researchers. Overall, approximately only one in nine women has received preventive counseling about violence and safety.

“Our research shows that we (as a healthcare community) haven’t been doing a good job of identifying and counseling about intimate partner violence,” said Jennifer S. McCall-Hosenfeld, primary care physician and assistant professor of medicine and public health sciences, Penn State College of Medicine. Of those women who participated in the Central Pennsylvania Women’s Health Study, she said, “Only 20 percent who had been exposed to intimate partner violence received safety and violence counseling in the two years following the abuse, and only 11 percent of all women had discussed violence and safety at home with a health care provider.”

McCall-Hosenfeld and colleagues Cynthia H. Chuang, associate professor of medicine and public health sciences, and Carol S. Weisman, Distinguished Professor of Public Health Sciences and Obstetrics and Gynecology, both at Penn State College of Medicine, examined preventive healthcare services for women of reproductive age and how exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) was associated with relevant preventive healthcare services. The study focused on women who had reported experiencing IPV — specifically physical violence, sexual violence and threats of either by a current or former partner or spouse.

10-Eye-Opening Quotes From Planned Parenthood Founder Margaret Sanger

Margaret Sangerhas been lauded by some as a woman of valor, but a closer look reveals that Planned Parenthood’s audacious founder had some unsavory things to say about matters of race, birth control, and abortion. An outspoken eugenicist herself, Sanger consistently promoted racist ideals with a contemptuous attitude. Read on to learn why Planned Parenthood hides behind a false memory of Sanger, and why, despite her extraordinarily prolific writing career, one rarely sees her quoted by Planned Parenthood leaders and apologists.

The most merciful thing that the large family does to one of its infant members is to kill it.

Woman and the New Race, ch. 6: “The Wickedness of Creating Large Families.” Here, Sanger argues that, because the conditions of large families tend to involve poverty and illness, it is better for everyone involved if a child’s life is snuffed out before he or she has a chance to pose difficulties to its family.

[We should] apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.

Article 1. The purpose of the American Baby Code shall be to provide for a better distribution of babies… and to protect society against the propagation and increase of the unfit.
Article 4. No woman shall have the legal right to bear a child, and no man shall have the right to become a father, without a permit… Article 6. No permit for parenthood shall be valid for more than one birth.

We should hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities. The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We don’t want the word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.

“233 Million Women Will Be Lacking Contraception In 2015”

Despite the increase in people using contraceptives over the past few decades, a recent study published in The Lancet reports that by 2015 the demand for contraception will increase by a further 62 million, which translates into 233 million women with partners who will not have access to contraception.

The researchers, from the National University of Singapore, conducted a study that evaluated the extent of contraceptive use among women aged 15 to 49. They analyzed previous data over the past two decades related to contraceptive use from over 194 countries.

They found that from 1990 to 2010 the use of contraception increased from 55 percent to 63 percent in women aged 15 to 49, at the same time the unmet need for it dropped by 3 percent (from 15 percent to 12 percent).

Global demand for contraception is expected to increase from around 900 million in 2010 to 962 million in 2015. This is mainly due to population growth.

The largest increase in the use of contraception use was in southern Asia and eastern, northern and central Africa. However, in two regions of Africa contraception prevalence remained low, in 2010 less than 20 percent of married women in this region used contraception.

146 million married women didn’t have a means of contraception in 2010 – in central, eastern and western Africa up to 20% of women had no access to contraception.

Friend or Foe: Babies Choose Sides Early

Mar. 12, 2013 — Infants as young as nine months old prefer individuals who are nice to people like them and mean to people who aren’t like them, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

In our social lives, we tend to gravitate toward people who have things in common with us, whether it’s growing up in the same town, disliking the same foods, or even sharing the same birthday. And research suggests that babies evaluate people in much the same way, preferring people who like the same foods, clothes, and toys that they like.

This preference helps us to form social bonds, but it can also have a dark side. Disliking people who are different than us may lead us to mistreat them, and excuse — or even applaud — cases in which others mistreat people who are different than us.

Are the roots of such tendencies present in infancy?

To find out, psychological scientist Kiley Hamlin, now a professor at the University of British Columbia, conducted two studies as a graduate student at Yale University with her advisor Karen Wynn and colleagues.

The researchers had 9- and 14-month-old infants choose which food they preferred: graham crackers or green beans. The infants then watched a puppet show in which one puppet preferred graham crackers, while another preferred green beans. That is, one puppet demonstrated that its food preference was the same as the infant’s, while the other demonstrated that its food preference was different from the infant’s.

After the puppets chose their foods, infants then watched another puppet show, in which either the similar puppet or the dissimilar puppet dropped its ball and wanted it back. On alternating events, infants saw that one character always helped the ball-less puppet by returning the ball to him, while another character always harmed the ball-less puppet by stealing the ball away.

Finally, infants were given the chance to choose between the helper (giving) and harmer (stealing) puppets.

Unsurprisingly, infants’ choices revealed that almost all the infants in both the 9- and 14-month-old groups preferred the character who helped the similar puppet over the character who harmed the similar puppet. Previous research has shown that infants like people who are nice to totally unknown individuals, so it makes sense that they would also like people who are nice to individuals who are similar to them.

Far more surprising was that almost all the infants at both ages preferred the character who harmed the dissimilar puppet over the character who helped him. Infants’ preference for those who harmed dissimilar others was just as strong as their preference for those who helped similar ones.

Nazi-type eugenics introduced in the UK as ‘health service’ consigns patients – even babies – to death row

It sounds innocent enough. Incurable patients are gently and peacefully eased from this world into the next, in the lap of loving care. This is a comforting label for a license to kill which is now being adopted in many British hospitals – the Liverpool Care Pathway. However, we discover from heart-rending reports in the UK media that end-of-life care can mean that patients – including seriously retarded new born babies – are starved and dehydrated until they pass away, in torment.

If this were a story about National Socialist death camps, instead of the United Kingdom in the 21st century, people would shake their heads at the horrors of the past. Yet authenticated reports demonstrate that in some admittedly rare cases, patients who were not terminally ill found themselves on the Pathway, without their consent or knowledge. Moreover, in one just such distressing instance reported in the Daily Mail, a sick man was placed on the Pathway in exactly those circumstances. Despite the protests of his family, he was cut off from all medical treatment, food and fluids and unsurprisingly died rather horribly.

The hospital did not deny the circumstances but informed the patient’s utterly traumatized relatives a mistake was made because nurses couldn’t locate the patient’s records, as if that made things any the better. So they argued, they did not know what to do with him. The case illustrates the curse of managerialism which has seized power over British hospitals, initiated by Thatcher, mesmerized as she was by corporatizing the health system, then magnified by the eager beavers of Blair’s New Labour. The Mail reported

‘Until now, end of life regime the Liverpool Care Pathway was thought to have involved only elderly and terminally-ill adults. But the Mail can reveal the practice of withdrawing food and fluid by tube is being used on young patients as well as severely disabled newborn babies. One doctor has admitted starving and dehydrating ten babies to death in the neonatal unit of one hospital alone. Writing in a leading medical journal, the physician revealed the process can take an average of ten days during which a baby becomes ‘smaller and shrunken.’

The infamous Jozef Mengele, Doctor Death of the Nazi concentration camp regime, would smirk at the chime with his ‘innocent’ medical experiments on those who were unable to protest or help themselves. These stories are breaking at a time when Britain’s much vaunted health service – once upon a time worshiped as a kind of established religion – is coming apart at the seams.

Exposure To DDT In Utero Linked With Hypertension

Exposure to the chemical DDT for babies in utero could be linked to hypertension later in life, says a new study from researchers at UC Davis and the Public Health Institute in Berkeley.

For the study, researchers reviewed data from a study titled the Child Health and Development Studies, in which roughly 15,000 women in the San Francisco area donated samples of serum collected during pregnancies between 1959 and 1967. They found that women born during the time that the pesticide was still legal in America (pre-1972) are significantly more likely to suffer from hypertension now as adults.

Are women actually less likely to buy products marketed using thin models?

Tuesday, March 12, 2013 by: David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Advertisements featuring beautiful female models and celebrities may actually make women less likely to purchase those products, according to a study conducted by researchers from Warwick Business School.

“We found that the way the picture of the perfectly shaped model was used was very important in determining a positive or negative effect on women’s self-perception,” researcher Tamara Ansons said.

Even when such marketing succeeds, the study found, it does so by making women shoppers feel bad about themselves.

The prevalence of advertising featuring sexually related content continues to increase. For example, a 2012 study by researchers from the University of Georgia found that while in 1983, only 15 percent of magazine ads used sexual content, 27 percent did so by 2003. But even though studies have found that women control 80 percent or more of household consumer spending, so far most of the research conducted on sexual advertising has focused on men.

“There is a lot of interest in how these ads affect men,” Ansons said. “We thought it was important to see how women were reacting and to look at the difference between a subtle and blatant presentation.”

The few studies looking at women’s reactions to such advertising have had contradictory results, Ansons said. According to the new study, that’s because women’s reactions depend on the context in which sexual images are used.

“We found that a woman’s self-perception and consequent effects on product evaluation depend on the degree of attention paid to the idealized image of a woman in advertisements,” she said.

Largely Present In Women, ‘Broken Heart Syndrome’ Is Often Triggered By Stress

Even though a newly recognized cardiomyopathy, which mainly impacts women, is typically treatable, Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy can also be deadly when compounded by other co-morbidities, such as heart failure, according to a study presented at the American College of Cardiology (ACC) Scientific Sessions.

This condition, formally known as Tako-tsubo cardiomyopathy (TTC) and informally known as stress cardiomyopathy or broken heart syndrome, has abrupt onset of symptoms and is characterized by a distinctive left ventricular (LV) contraction profile. Ninety percent of the time, this condition affects women, who are usually middle aged and older, and the condition usually is triggered by a stressful event.

“Although TTC is typically reversible and considered to have favorable clinical outcomes, we have identified an important subset of patients, particularly those with severe heart failure and hypotension, who can have a substantial mortality risk,” says the study’s lead author Scott W. Sharkey, MD, a research cardiologist at the Minneapolis Heart Institute Foundation and a physician at the Minneapolis Heart Institute® at Abbott Northwestern Hospital in Minneapolis. “It’s also important that physicians are aware this is not a rare a condition, as it is present in nearly 10 percent of women who present to the hospital with suspected heart attacks.”

They found that severe hypotensive heart failure occurred in 45 patients. In this subset, 9 female patients died in-hospital despite aggressive treatment intervention, representing the only TTC-related hospital deaths in the 250 patient cohort.

Teen pregnancy ads drawing fire in New York City

Administration-funded ad campaigns in New York City aren’t exactly known for their subtlety. Heavy on the shock value, campaigns against smoking and obesity, for example, have provided graphic and often grisly reminders of the effects city resident’s lifestyle choices can have.

The latest campaign targets teen pregnancy. Although ads have so far only appeared at bus stops (the subway splash will happen next week) the campaign is already drawing plenty of fire from young moms and advocacy groups who work with pregnant teens.

“Honestly mom … chances are he won’t stay with you. What happens to me?” a child lectures in one ad. In another, a tear-stained toddler scolds, “I’m twice as likely not to graduate high school because you had me as a teen.” Detractors of the campaign say that it unfairly stigmatizes poor and minority girls. Teen moms say that it is hurtful.

“My little sister, she used to always tell me I was her role model and I questioned what type of role model am I to her. What type of daughter am I to my parents. What type of sister am I to my siblings,” said Gloria Malone, a young mom and author of the blog Teen Mom NYC. “There was a lot of shame and it took a long time to get over that shame and those ads just bring it right back.”

Teen pregnancy rates in the city have fallen 27 percent since 2003; the City Human Resources Administration (CHRA) hopes the new campaign will help curb the more than 20,000 teen pregnancies that still occur each year.

CHRA spokeswoman Connie Ress wrote in a statement, “Our campaign is designed with strong messages to start a necessary discussion about the serious outcomes of teen pregnancy. The facts are clear about the responsibilities and consequences of not waiting until you’re financially and emotionally ready to take care of a child.”

KS Assisted Suicide Bill Open-Ended

American assisted suicide advocates pretend they want a very narrow license for “terminally ill” people for whom nothing else can be done to alleviate suffering. It’s pure baloney. They have a much more radical goal–they just hide it for political reasons. But once people accept the ideological premise of the movement–killing as an acceptable answer to human suffering–then eventually logic will move the needle as it has in the Netherlands, Belgium, Switzerland, and during the Kevorkian escapade.

But every once in a while, a little truth seeps in. In Kansas, an assisted suicide legalization bill has been introduced, that won’t pass, but which illustrates my point. Note the definition of “terminal illness.” From HB 2108:

(p) “Terminal disease” means an incurable and irreversible disease that has been medically confirmed.

Well, that could include just about anything, from asymptomatic HIV, to arthritis, diabetes under medicinal control (which is incurable and not reversed with insulin), bi-polar disease, and the debilitation of old age.

The goal of assisted suicide is a broad death license. If it is a “right,” then it has to be open to everyone, not just some. That is the real argument we should be having, because if it is legalized, that is what we will eventually become.

Activists at UN Meeting Push “Erotic Justice,” Sex for Kids

The 57th annual Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) begins its second week today, and the most striking of observations has to be the contrasts between the perceived needs of women in the Developing versus the Developed World.

During the waning days of the conference’s first week and well into this most recent weekend, I watched and listened as African women discussed and debated the all-important Outcome Document amongst themselves. Luckily for me, English is their common language and I as sat beside them in the Business Center of our clean but quite modest hotel late into the night on Saturday AND Sunday, I heard their concerns.

They are worried about their daughter’s AND son’s education; they want access to potable water in the more remote regions of their respective countries; more doctors, and in keeping with this year’s conference theme, they want real life-and-death protection for their daughters

They broke up their very informal, but most enlightening meeting just before midnight on Saturday and as I observed them gathering their belongings I couldn’t help but learn that some of them were sleeping four to a room. The CSW is a very big deal for them and I can’t fathom the sacrifices they have made to make it to this meeting. They are here expecting and holding on to the promise of the Commission to make life better, sustainable, and survivable for them back home.

Across town however, in the sleek conference centers of Upper Eastside hotels the women of the First World were discussing their concerns.

As reported by the left-leaning Climate Exchange, a female representative of Development Alternatives for a New Era (DAWN) and DIVA for Equality, affirmed the importance of the CSW57 Outcome Statement.

…she called for strongest defense by States and civil society [NGOs] of the Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) language in the Outcome document text. She also called for specific language on early and forced marriage, on sexual orientation and gender identity, and for protection for all Women Human Rights Defenders at the front-lines of defense against much of the interlinked bodily, social and structural violence facing communities.

She also affirmed the historical moment of this CSW57 by address,

…all forms of sexual and gender based violence, and discussed the interlinked nature of economic, ecological, ecological and erotic justice, and need for more analysis, advocacy and supportive UN texts to reflect the same.

Her comments are perfectly in-line with much of the discussion and debates being held in many of the negotiation rooms. Delegates from other developed countries are calling for language in the text of the document that requires that girls as young as 8 and 10 years of age be allowed to “enjoy their reproductive rights to their full capacity.”

Seriously.

If we are to believe their statistics, the UN claims that the vast majority of people living in poverty worldwide are women. If we are to believe their statistics, the UN claims the vast majority of civilians dying in armed conflicts are women. If we are to believe their statistics, the UN claims that the vast majority of the world’s illiterate are women. If we are to believe the statistics, the UN claims that girls have a much smaller chance of making it to their 5th birthday than boys.

“Working moms, don’t try to be perfect at home”

Editor’s note:Courtney E. Martin is a writer and speaker who lives in Brooklyn, New York. She is the author of “Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: How the Quest for Perfection is Harming Young Women,” among other books. Follow her on Twitter at @courtwrites. Join CNN Opinion on Facebook for a live discussion about women and the workplace on Tuesday from noon to 1 p.m. ET. Watch CNN’s special coverage of “What Women Want” throughout Monday and Tuesday. Plus, watch Soledad O’Brien’s interview with Sheryl Sandberg on “Starting Point” at 7 a.m. ET on Monday, March 18th.

(CNN) — In her new, already much-discussed book, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg argues we need to “lean in” more to our careers. We need to ask for flexibility even when the thought of doing so scares us, say yes to the promotions and the big projects, and radiate our own worthiness at cocktail parties just like the Harvard boys. Agreed.

But to prevent falling flat on our faces from all that forward momentum, we also need to learn to “lean out” in other areas of our lives.

Too many women might let their employers off the hook, shying away from salary negotiation or accepting policies that prevent working mothers from thriving, but more still never let themselves off the hook.

It’s time that women wave the white flag of surrender over our own messy, beautiful lives. We must accept imperfection — physical, domestic, social — and strive, instead, to be whole, bold, interesting. We must embrace psychologist D.W. Winnicott’s decades-old idea of the “good enough mother.”

Obese New Mothers May Have Higher Heart Attack, Stroke Risk

MONDAY, March 11 (HealthDay News) — Obese young women who have recently given birth have a greatly increased risk of heart attack and stroke, according to a new study.

Researchers analyzed data from more than 273,000 women in Denmark with an average age of 30 who had given birth between 2004 and 2009. None of the women had a history of stroke, heart disease or kidney problems. During up to six years of follow-up, 68 of the women had a heart attack and 175 had a stroke.

Obese women were twice as likely as those with normal weight to suffer a heart attack or stroke within four to five years after giving birth. This increased risk among obese women remained even after the researchers accounted for other pregnancy-related complications or cardiovascular risk factors, including smoking.

Exercise During Gestation Might Affect Future Fertility

Mar. 11, 2013 — A short walk around the barn might improve the future fertility of Yorkshire pigs. According to research presented by Samantha Kaminski, a graduate student at North Dakota State University, swine fetuses showed significant ovarian development after their mothers exercised.

Kaminski and fellow researchers already knew that uterine blood flow could affect blood flow to the ovaries of developing fetuses. To further study the relationship between uterine blood flow and ovary development, Kaminski and fellow researchers designed an experiment to increase blood flow through exercise.

The team selected 15 female pigs and bred them to a boar. They then exercised the pregnant sows between days 40 and 105 of gestation. For exercise, the sows were walked for 30 minutes a day, three times a week. The researchers used this exercise regimen with two generations of pigs.

With the first generation, Kaminski and fellow researchers studied ovaries from neonate piglets, adolescent piglets and gilts at six months of age. They looked at ovarian weight, cell proliferation and types of developing cells to compare how exercise might affect ovarian development.

They found that the effects of exercise seemed to decrease as the female pigs grew. In an analysis of heavier weight neonates, Kaminski saw more cell proliferation in the group from the exercised sows.

The adolescent pigs showed no differences in ovarian weight or overall cell proliferation. Kaminski did find a difference in the types of cells in the ovaries between treatment groups. The pigs from exercised sows had a greater proliferation of cells in the antral healthy follicles. The proliferation of antral healthy follicles has been used in previous studies as an indicator of healthy ooyctes and follicles.v

Fertility Destroying Chemical Added To Tap, Milk, Salt

Fluoride is promoted above good nutrition as a ‘therapeutic’ chemical necessary to prevent cavities, but it lowers IQ, calcifies the pineal gland and harms fertility, among a wide range of other adverse health effects.

There is no question remaining that fluoride lowers IQ, at least as far as high-quality epidemiological research published in peer-reviewed journals has shown.

Take the conclusion of this systematic review of the literature published in the journal Biological and Trace Elements Research in 2008, which looked at whether fluoride exposure has increased the risk of low intelligence quotient (IQ) in China over the past 20 years:

[C]hildren who live in a fluorosis area [high fluoride exposure] have five times higher odds of developing low IQ than those who live in a nonfluorosis area or a slight fluorosis area.

[See our IQ and Fluoride research page for seven first-hand study abstracts on this connection]

Arguably, those who do question this causal connection despite the research are already under fluoride’s powerful spell, since they don’t take sufficient care to reduce their exposure to this intellectually-disabling chemical. They’ve consumed the fluoride-contaminated Kool-Aid, and are unable to comprehend what is still obvious to those who have not.

But fluoride’s toxicity is not specific to only one type of tissue, i.e. neurological, but extends throughout the human body, having been linked to at least 30 distinct health problems stretching from calcification of soft tissue and endocrine glands (such as the pineal) to hypothyroidism, from hair loss to cancer. [see Fluoride Toxicity citations here]

While lawmakers, regulators and the industry using it consider the public gullible enough to believe that the IQ-lowering effects of fluoride a worthwhile price to pay for ‘healthy’ and ‘attractive’ teeth (even though fluoride exposure leads to fluorosis, an irreversible spotting, often yellowing of the enamel of the teeth), a more serious health problem lurks beneath the propaganda that has converted an industrial byproduct and pollutant into a “therapeutic” water, salt and milk additive. That problem is fluoride’s infertility and abortifacient properties.

Back in 1994, a study was published in the Journal of Toxicology and Environmental Healththat found exposure to high fluoride concentrations in drinking water is associated with decreased birth rates. The researchers had reviewed the biomedical literature for fluoride toxicity and found decreased fertility in most animal species studied. This lead them to question whether fluoride would also affect human birth rates. They reported their method and results as follows:

A U.S. database of drinking water systems was used to identify index counties with water systems reporting fluoride levels of at least 3 ppm. These and adjacent counties were grouped in 30 regions spread over 9 states. For each county, two conceptionally different exposure measures were defined, and the annual total fertility rate (TFR) for women in the age range 10-49 yr was calculated for the period 1970-1988. For each region separately, the annual TFR was regressed on the fluoride measure and sociodemographic covariables. Most regions showed an association of decreasing TFR with increasing fluoride levels. Meta-analysis of the region-specific results confirmed that the combined result was a negative TFR/fluoride association with a consensus combined p value of .0002-.0004, depending on the analytical scenario. There is no evidence that this outcome resulted from selection bias, inaccurate data, or improper analytical methods. However, the study is one that used population means rather than data on individual women. Whether or not the fluoride effect on the fertility rate found at the county level also applies to individual women remains to be investigated.

Another study published in the American Journal of Industrial Medicine in 1995 found that among fabrication workers fluoride compound exposure was associated with an increased risk of spontaneous abortion:

Risk of spontaneous abortion (SAB) was examined in relation to chemical and physical agents in a retrospective study of employees of 14 seminconductor manufacturers: After screening over 6,000 employees, 506 current and 385 former workers were eligible. If a woman had multiple eligible pregnancies, one was selected at random. Telephone interviews provided data on demographics and occupational and other exposures during the first trimester. Two groups of chemicals accounted for the 45% excess risk of SAB among fabrication-room (fab) workers: photoresist and developed solvents (PDS), including glycol ethers, and fluoride compounds used in etching. Women exposed to high levels of both these agents were at greater risk (RR = 3.21, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 1.29-5.96). In fab workers without these exposures, SAB rates were not elevated (adjusted relative risk [RR] = 0.98, 95% CI = 0.55-1.69). An association was seen with workplace stress, which was not limited to women exposed to PDS or fluoride, nor did stress explain the associations between these chemicals and SAB.

Considering these findings, now let us zoom down to the animal level of research, which is unequivocal as far as fluoride’s anti-fertility/contraceptive/abortifacient properties.

Health Benefits of Marriage Mostly Apply to Those Already Healthy

FRIDAY, March 8 (HealthDay News) — The health benefits of marriage seem to fade when you need them most, according to a large new study.

Although marriage does seem to benefit those who are in good health, it provides less protection against death as health declines, the Ohio State University researchers found. The researchers also discovered that married people are more likely than others to overestimate how healthy they are.

“We believe marriage is still good for the health of some people, but it is not equally protective for everyone,” study lead author Hui Zheng, an assistant professor of sociology, said in a university news release. “For those who are already in poor health, marriage doesn’t seem to provide any extra benefits.”

The findings were true for both men and women and were similar for those who were separated, divorced, widowed or never married, according to the study, which was published in the March issue of the Journal of Health and Social Behavior.

It seems cliche, but it just might be true. The more sexist a man is, the more likely he is to be into big boobs.

A recent study from the University of Westminster, published in February in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, showed that men’s attitudes toward women influence their attitudes about ideal breast size. The researchers interviewed 361 white, heterosexual men, ranging in age from 18 to 68. (Since ethnicity has been previously shown to impact how individuals perceive breast size, the researchers decided to pull participants from just one self-identified racial category.) Each man was shown five different 3-D models of women, each with a different breast size, and then asked to record which “woman” he found most physically attractive.

Afterward, the participants were given surveys which measured each man’s level of hostility toward women, his attitudes about relationships between men and women, benevolent sexism and how much he objectified women.

The researchers found that the largest percentage of participants (32.7 percent) rated medium-sized breasts as “most attractive,” followed by large (24.4 percent), very large (19.1 percent), small (15.5 percent) and very small (8.3 percent). However, a preference for large and very large breasts was significantly correlated with overt sexism, benevolent sexism, female objectification and hostile attitudes toward women. This connection was strongest when it came to benevolent sexism. In other words, men who tend to idealize “traditional” femininity and perceive women as meek and weak, are also the most likely to prefer big boobs. “It is arguable that benevolently sexist men perceived larger female breasts as attractive because larger breast size on a woman is associated with perceived femininity,” wrote the researchers.

Can reality be predicted by understanding the underlying mathematical make-up of reality? Zachary K. Hubbard breaks down this week's current events, predicts the outcomes of (rigged) sporting events, and exposes the on-going web of lies and distractions with careful calculation. Are you ready for "The Gematria Effect!"??
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